“Don’t worry about the name until you have some killer music written…the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how cool your name is if your music sucks! Similarly, if your music kicks ass I wouldn’t care if your band name was Medonna’s Little Bitch. I’d still buy the CD and proudly crank it up whenever I had the chance!” Quote from the band Mucus Membrane, in “Death to Autumn”, by Rob Harvilla, Easy Bay Express, March 10, 2004

This is a great story about how to name your metal band. Expert advice is offered by members of bands with names like Something Must Die, Death By Death, and Scorched-Earth Policy. The quote above is something I may incorporate into a presentation one day. More good advice from the band Hacksaw to the Throat: “Don’t try to make a cliché poetic hardcore screamo name like Poison the Well or anything involving the following words: ashes, beneath, fallen, autumn, bled, bleeding, darkened, black. If you take this path, you are clearly unoriginal and nothing you will do in your life will have any meaning whatsoever.” Yeah, what he said.

I’d love to name a band. Actually, I thought a really good band name would be the Gerunding Nouns, but nobody but me thought that was funny.

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“”Names are perhaps the single-most important issue of corporate communication today,” said Naseem Javed, founder of a corporate naming company called ABC Namebank International. ”With millions and millions of product names clashing in cyberspace, a name is no longer something people can sit around a kitchen and come up with.” A company can no longer say, ”We make machines for business and we are international, so we will be INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES.”

”GENERAL MOTORS worked for an industrial giant in the 20’s, but it doesn’t work today,” Javed said. ”The loose change is gone — all those zodiac signs and constellations, GENESIS and PEGASUS, they’re all gone. Apples, oranges, pineapples. Look at the newspaper business — you have thousands of papers, and they’re all COURIER or JOURNAL or DISPATCH or POST. These people have a hell of a problem going into cyberspace.” ” Get Out of My Namespace, by James Gleik, NY Times, March 21, 2004 (After it goes to the archive login as “catchword7″ password “catchword”)

Not sure I agree. There is an awful lot of value in descriptive names - that is, names which say what they are, like General Motors, or Cable & Wireless, or even Entrepreneur Magazine. In the brand-clutter of everyday life, we often recommend that our clients “de-brand” whenever possible, and just say what the thing is. Consumers appreciate the direct approach.

And is the name really the most important issue in corporate communication? A good name will always help, and a bad name might hurt, but the name is not going to make or break a company. A good name will not save a doomed idea (pets.com), and a bad name will not break a great idea.

I do agree, however, that it’s really hard for people to name their own companies these days. Hey, it can be hard for us to find names that are available, and we do this for a living! One of the reasons that companies like Catchword and Namebank are in business is that we take away the pain of finding an appropriate and available name. When you’ve spent 40 CEO-hours trying to find the right name and you’re cross-eyed from typing names into WHOIS, it’s time to call in the experts.

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“Every day, companies lose their domain names by accident because they failed to renew. Protect your valuable online identity for 100 years and rest assured that it will be automatically renewed into the next century.”

100 year domain registration? Really?

This is a new service from Network Solutions, your government-approved monopolistic domain registrar. It’s only $9.99 a year for 100 years = $999 total. “This is a savings of over 70% compared to paying annually”, it says. Before signing up for such a contract, I would consider whether the economy, the Internet, the United States, the planet Earth, and any life in this solar system will still be around in 100 years.

Or you could just go to GoDaddy and pay $8.95 a year.

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“Yorkshire Couple Named Baby Diot Coke - in 1379
Naming your child after a popular soft drink could be seen as a little bit faddish but the parents of young Diot Coke might be forgiven – they gave their baby daughter the name way back in 1379.

Researchers at the National Archives believe that the little girl, born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was the unfortunate victim of the corruption of the name Dionisia. One of the diminutives derived from that name on its path to the modern day Denise was Diot.” Scotsman.com News, March 9, 2004

Thanks for the tip, Wordlab. But really, who writes these stories? Why was the little girl an “unfortunate victim”? Is that supposed to be funny? OK, maybe it’s funny to non-Americans. The most interesting part of the story is at the end, where we learn that “names such as Godelena, Helwise, Idony, Avice and Dionisia were more popular than some of the names now considered traditional, such as Mary.” Now those are beautiful names! (BTW, I think “Helwise” would be the “full” version of “Samwise”.)

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 Wordcraft : The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business by Alex Frankel

Just read about this book in Inc. magazine, where it’s described by Michael Dirda as a book about namers. “Frankel includes a half-dozen winning profiles or corporate wordsmiths, image makers, and advertising gurus.” Hmm, he didn’t call me, so I guess I’m not in there. The book is out on April 20th; we’ll review it when it arrives at the palatial Catchword World Headquarters.

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